What the heck is a ½ game suspension? Growing up I never heard of (or received) a “½ spanking!” The games people play with the people who play in the: National Conspiracy to Accumulate Assets (NCAA).

I Really Wish That Black College Athletes Who Play For These “Big Money” Universities; Would Wake up and Smell The Reality; they should know:

The NCAA does not exist to create and/or to protect and promote student athletes.

The NCAA disciplinary system is inconsistent, hypocritical, racially discriminatory, arbitrary, and yet is very well structured to maximize (when possible) the playing time of its most marketable athletes.

College Sports is about Business and not about sports. Therefore,

It provides huge financial benefits to a lot of folks (the networks, the products producers (hats, shirts, water bottles, pennants, etc.), the universities, the college alumni-giving-fundraising office, and a cast of industries and people dependent on college sports.

In the present system you are a commodity, a product, a tool, an expendable means to generate these huge profit making entities. Therefore,

Except for a few ethical coaches, your health, psychological well-being, your gaining a meaningful educational experience that will allow you to make a living if you are one of the majority of college athletes who will never see the inside of a professional sports locker room, unless you are there as a reporter, or as a cleaner.

You will be convinced that “if you want to go pro”, you must sacrifice your health, your access to a meaningful and future marketable free college education; you will be told that you have very few choices; but you must maintain the power to create a positive outcome for your own life, and your own future.

You are essentially an unpaid professional; who is expected to exhibit all of the expectations of a paid professional (i.e. practice time, study (plays) time, and conditioning, etc.). You are building wonderful libraries and science labs for which you will probably never enter during your 4-5 year college experience.

If you engage in any illegal or immoral behavior that interferes with the NCAA or the University’s ability to make money because it harms their capacity to positively brand and market the “sport”; you will be replaced by one of the ten (essentially equally) talented young athletes who are waiting to take your place.

The people who look like you, the community where you may have grown up, the HBCU’s in your home state will gain the least financially from this unpaid exploited “professional” athletic system.

The “Noise”: Mass adulation, cheering fans, “back-slapping gifts” from alumni; is conditional and temporary. The “attention” given to you for exhibiting “good” behavior; is not about building good character, rather it is to keep you eligible to play.

Program “fillers” courses, and silly made up majors are designed to give you the maximum time to practice, spend time in the weight room, and to assist in maintaining your academic eligibility. The “tutors” who “help” write your assignments and papers will disappear once you cease to be a marketable (payable) commodity; and they surely will not follow you into the “real” world, once your playing days are over. Professors, supervisors and other authority figures you encounter after your playing days will not follow an unwritten rule of giving you a pass no matter the quality of your work. If you are confused to the point that you refuse to even pretend you are a student, and do no work, the college will be forced to place you on academic probation.

You should keep your head (your “mother wits”) above the artificial, made-up world in which you now exist; stay in a place of doing what is right and just, find a spiritual center, cling to it, and move only from that point of reference. Love and care for yourself.

Starting in High School, gather a circle (encircling) team of trusted adult advisors around you; A group that holds your future wellbeing as the priority; folks who don’t look to financially benefit if you turn pro! This team could include your parents/family members, a religious leader, a high school educator/ mentor, the family doctor; and should definitely include an Attorney. Don’t meet any college recruiter or coach alone.

And the powerful possibility of shifting the present reality:

Finally, (and this is my “hope-stretch”/Dream point) Think about attending a HBCU. I know and heard the big “Psyche-Sell”: “if you don’t play for____________; you won’t be seen by pro-scouts.” I think that the networks are so focused on making huge financial profit, that they will “follow” the “best athletes” to the newly empowered teams and conferences; the professional leagues will seek to recruit the best athletes, wherever they are. Most important, you will be immersed in an environment where the interest in helping students who look like you to graduate, is actually an institutional mission. Given a serious educational experience; there is the opportunity for you to be prepared for a successful life after a professional sports experience; or if that professional experience is interrupted by injury (or just being cut); or if you never get to the professional level. But whatever you decided; heed the instructions given before a boxing match: “protect yourself at all times!”